Two Days, One Night traffics in suspense and is a sort of thriller. But as a search for a lost (or stolen) livelihood, it is also a descendant of The Bicycle Thief, the neo-realist classic that implies a world in which “the poor must steal from each other to survive."

“What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present,” the provocatively-titled exhibit at the RISD Museum in Providence, presents a bracing alternative to one prevailing way of telling the story of postwar American art.

It was for The Puppetmaster that Taiwanese master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien first developed a startlingly advanced form of montage that has been compared to the movement of clouds drifting across the sky.

Manakamana, the new documentary by anthropologist Stephanie Spray and filmmaker Pacho Velez, is a motion picture that transports the viewer to a mountaintop Hindu temple, as well as back in time to the medium’s dawn.

Although too capricious (or should we say promiscuous?) to be a taxonomy, Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac is designed to illustrate and exhaust every popular theory of nymphomania, including, of course, the idea that the condition exists only as a male fantasy.

Peter Maresca’s outsized and outlandish anthology Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915, shows just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years.

David Cronenberg is a filmmaker of ideas, one being the notion that human beings have merged with technology. His protagonists are often cyborgs as, in some sense, he is as well—not a commercial director with artistic aspirations so much as an avant-garde filmmaker who has contrived a commercial career.

František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová is easy to watch but difficult to follow. Thirty years after its release, it was named overwhelmingly by a poll of Czech critics and filmmakers as the best movie ever produced in Czechoslovakia, yet it remains little known outside its native land.

James Nares’s Street, an engrossing and celebratory hour-long video projection of life in New York City, captures those intensified moments of metropolitan existence that, save in the midst of catastrophe, we usually take for granted.

“Every photograph is a fake from start to finish,” the photographer Edward Steichen asserted in the first issue of Camera Work in 1903. In what amounts to a backhanded defense of photography as art, Steichen explained that “a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph” was “practically impossible.” “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an exhibition now up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (later traveling to the National Gallery and Houston’s Museum of Fine Art), makes a vigorous case for understanding the medium as Steichen did.

Can we speak of a twenty-first-century cinema? And if so, on what basis? In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the French film critic André Bazin characterized cinema as an idealistic phenomenon and cinema-making as an intrinsically irrational enterprise. “There was not a single inventor who did not try to combine sound and relief with animation of the image,” Bazin maintained in “The Myth of Total Cinema.”

Surpassed only by The Expendables 2, with Sylvester Stallone, the Dinesh D’Souza political documentary 2016: Obama’s America was the second-highest grossing movie in America the week that it opened—timed to coincide with the Republican National Convention—and is now among the top ten highest earning documentaries in history. Like the RNC, 2016 is designed to show the president as a false prophet and a failed leader; unlike the RNC, the D’Souza film is less interested in the nature of Obama’s politics than in the enigma of his personality. With the Democrats gathering in Charlotte to recapture the Obama story, I sought out 2016 at the Regal Union Square in Manhattan to learn more.

At once unsentimentally au courant and fixated on that past, Chris Marker was the Janus of world cinema. His unclassifiable documentaries treat memory as the stuff of science fiction, a notion he shared with his early associate Alain Resnais. Hardly a Luddite, Marker thrived on technological paradox. A half-hour succession of still images evoking motion pictures as time travel, La Jetée, his most generally known work, could have been made for Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century zoopraxiscope.

With the escalation of the Vietnam War, every Marxist intellectual, it seemed, wanted to write a Western. The most notable was Franco Solinas (1927–1982), a teenaged partisan and longtime member of the Italian Communist Party, journalist for the Communist newspaper L'Unità, and author. Solinas worked on four Spaghetti Westerns—all included in a three-week-long series at New York’s Film Forum that begins June 1—contributing to this wildly commercial and equally disreputable mode as decisively as director Sergio Leone or composer Ennio Morricone.

A nation must have its culture heroes, and current wisdom among Anglo-American movie critics and programmers has advanced Terence Davies to the position of Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Beginning this week, viewers in New York will have an unusual chance to assess his work afresh, with the US release of The Deep Blue Sea, his new version of the 1952 Terence Rattigan adultery drama of the same name, coinciding with a retrospective of his work at BAM and a revival of The Long Day Closes at Film Forum.

A lone lean figure strides purposefully through a dark tunnel, maybe a highway underpass. There’s no fear. A familiar husky voice whispers that “it’s half time--both teams are in their locker rooms, discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.” One needn’t be a genius like Karl Rove to catch the drift of the two-minute Clint Eastwood-narrated Chrysler spot shown mid-Super Bowl last Sunday and everywhere else ever since. But get it Rove did.

Culled from a thousand hours of archival footage and four years in the making, this unconventional documentary assembled by the émigré Romanian film-essayist Andrei Ujică is a three-hour immersion in a totalitarian leader's official reality.

March 25, 2015
— April 7, 2015

Whether or not the misanthropic French novelist arranged his own abduction in September 2011, he certainly contrived this mock documentary account, written and directed by Guillaume Nicloux, and starring Houellebecq himself.

January 16, 2015
— March 22, 2015

Impossible to pigeon-hole, this Alsace-born graphic artist has written and illustrated tender children’s books, some of which have been animated, as well as detailed sketches of masochistic models and professional dominatrices. Everything is here.

January 26, 2015
— February 1, 2015

Almost indescribable, this 1933 vehicle for the diminutive Anglo-German musical star Lilian Harvey (and the Mussolini-sponsored Piccoli Marionettes) has something to do with puppets substituting for human performers.

December 3, 2014
— January 30, 2015

January 17, 2015
— January 25, 2015

Arguably the most important innovator of TV’s first “golden age,” Robert Herridge produced all manner of tele-specific offerings; The Paley Center for Media is featuring Herridge’s remarkable jazz and folk shows.

December 24, 2014
— January 24, 2015

Two Days, One Night, the neo-neorealist Dardenne brothers’s latest parable of Christian-Marxist solidarity, concerns a newly laid-off factory worker who has a weekend to persuade a dozen colleagues to sacrifice their individual bonuses.

January 9, 2015
— January 18, 2015

The fourth edition of the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual international avant-garde, documentary, and installation mix features the New York premiere of Hard to Be a God, the last film by Russian filmmaker Aleksei German.

Ongoing

January 11, 2015
— January 12, 2015

First imagined as a vehicle for the Marx Brothers, Million Dollar Legs (1932) is the most surreal of W.C. Fields’s Paramount films; it's paired with the entertaining variety show that is International House (1933).

January 8, 2015
— January 12, 2015

Arguably the most important innovator of TV’s first “golden age,” Robert Herridge produced all manner of tele-specific offerings; Anthology Film Archives will be showing his adaptations of All the King’s Men among others.

September 4, 2014
— September 11, 2014

July 18, 2014
— September 8, 2014

Harvard is consecrating the summer of 2014 to the great pulp artist who pioneered sword-and-sorcery, science fiction, spy, and serial killer movies in Germany—then emigrated to Hollywood where he helped invent film noir.

May 6, 2014
— June 24, 2014

As the world’s most influential film journal publishes its seven-hundredth issue, two successive series mark the event. The first is a “secret trove” of French classics; the second focuses on recent films championed by the still polemical journal.

May 28, 2014
— June 3, 2014

May 16, 2014
— June 1, 2014

Prolific and foredoomed, R.W. Fassbinder provided West German cinema with its belated new wave. The first part of a comprehensive retrospective focuses mainly on Fassbinder’s electrifying early period.

April 18, 2014
— April 24, 2014

Not to be confused with the truncated, dubbed, and reedited version released in the US, the Japanese Godzilla has a news-bulletin urgency--at once audaciously lurid and fearsomely somber, it’s all business and pure dream.

April 11, 2014
— April 17, 2014

April 3, 2014
— April 6, 2014

The film component of the Burroughs centennial celebration is a suitably outré mixed bag, including Taking Tiger Mountain (1983), a rediscovered 35mm feature co-written by Burroughs (from his Blade Runner script).

January 31, 2014
— March 30, 2014

One of the most muscular of postwar genre directors (Manny Farber called him “a tin-can De Sade”), Anthony Mann opened up the Western, making eight scenic examples with James Stewart as a life-battered protagonist.

March 29, 2014,
7:30 pm

A newly restored 1928 version of Helen Hunt Jackson’s massively popular late-nineteenth-century novel of Native American life in post-Mexican War southern California has its world premiere on native ground.

November 1, 2013
— January 19, 2014

This fall, David Cronenberg is the subject of three new exhibitions in Toronto. The main one is 'David Cronenberg: Evolution,' devoted to his film work, another is curated by him, and the third consists of artworks commissioned in his honor.

December 6, 2013
— December 31, 2013

December 21, 2013,
9 pm

Robin Harvey’s much-loved 1971 cult film (recently discovered in a longer version by the Harvard Film Archive) is striking for being one of the few British horror movies with a totally indigenous feel.

September 7, 2013
— November 10, 2013

October 27, 2013,
5 pm

Set in pastoral East Anglia during the mid-17th-century civil war, it stars Vincent Price as a pious opportunist, a historical figure who profited from the chaos by discovering Catholic witches among the peasantry.

September 20, 2013
— September 28, 2013

The citywide celebration of the avant-garde composer-activist’s sixtieth birthday gets downhome and personal at Anthology Film Archives, where John Zorn has been something of a musician in residence for years.

September 13, 2013
— September 27, 2013

There are three ways to look at this portrait of “an ex-Portuguese colony that really never was” —as a minimalist meta-thriller, as an eccentric travelogue, and as a disconnected succession of beautiful images artfully deranged by narration.

Ongoing

The inadvertent self-disclosure that characterized the Nixon White House continues apace in Penny Lane’s found-footage assemblage, drawn largely from the super-8 home movies shot by the president's three closest aides.

September 6, 2013
— September 12, 2013

Ongoing

Experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen is known mainly for his unconventional documentaries, and his new film is equally difficult to characterize—neither a city symphony nor a love story nor a movie about Breugel, but a serenely eccentric way of looking.

July 11, 2013
— August 29, 2013

The massive Simenon oeuvre inspired its share of film adaptations. The dozen here selected are largely French, but also include Hungarian master Béla Tarr, and Phil Karlson’s first-rate noir, The Brothers Rico.

August 29, 2013

August 8, 2013
— August 21, 2013

The massive Simenon oeuvre inspired its share of film adaptations. The dozen here selected are largely French, but also include Hungarian master Béla Tarr, and Phil Karlson’s first-rate noir, The Brothers Rico.

July 17, 2013
— July 30, 2013

July 12, 2013
— July 25, 2013

Alienation has never been more gorgeously indulged than in Michelangelo Antonioni's widescreen spectacular—a mystery that, lavishing neorealist attention on the rich and aimless, casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through.

July 12, 2013
— July 18, 2013

Alienation has never been more gorgeously indulged than in Michelangelo Antonioni's widescreen spectacular—a mystery that, lavishing neorealist attention on the rich and aimless, casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through.

June 5, 2013
— July 8, 2013

Dwan directed Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple at their heights, and Ronald Reagan in the twilight of his career, but he’s most fondly remembered by film historians as a prolific problem-solver who adroitly handled whatever came his way.

June 19, 2013,
7:30 pm

An unpredictable event scheduled in the midst of an ongoing, thoroughly outré series of movies screening under the rubric “Sects, Cults and Mind Control,” this evening promises all manner of celluloid material on the Church of Scientology.

Ongoing

May 24, 2013
— May 26, 2013

The dean of avant-garde film artists is being recognized by two New York institutions, The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives. The Anthology program (titled “Insistent Clamor Forever”) offers an idiosyncratic career retrospective.

April 3, 2013
— May 6, 2013

May 2, 2013
— May 5, 2013

The dean of avant-garde film artists is being recognized by two New York institutions, The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives. The MoMA show features new 3D works, a selection of early films, and a few of his favorite movies.

April 29, 2013,
7:30 pm

The most influential and incendiary avant-garde film ever made in America, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures had its first public screening a half-century ago in New York. Anthology is marking the occasion by recreating the original bill.

January 19, 2013
— April 7, 2013

Schroeter's most visionary movies—the willfully crude, aggressively campy low-budget opera-travesties he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s—were a significant influence on both Fassbinder and Syberberg.

February 23, 2013,
7 pm

February 20, 2013
— February 21, 2013

Having its US premiere courtesy of Film Comment magazine, Mikael Marcimain’s leisurely political thriller is based on the scandal known in Sweden as Bordellhärvan that nearly brought down the socialist government in the 1970s.

January 11, 2013
— January 31, 2013

New York supported a scrappy, streetwise off-Hollywood well before the coinage “American independent.” “New Yawk New Wave” surveys the movement from Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss through Scorsese’s Mean Streets.

January 4, 2013
— January 13, 2013

January 9, 2013,
7:30 pm

Barbara Rubin’s 1963 *Christmas on Earth*, made when she was eighteen, is an ethereal tangle of guys posing like Greek statues, girls painted like archaic fertility goddesses, and fingers probing orifices in bleached black and white.

October 19, 2012,
7:30 pm

September 28, 2012
— October 14, 2012

New York’s festival of festivals gives local premieres to the most feted movies last May at Cannes (Michael Haneke’s *Amour*, Leos Carax’s *Holy Motors*, Abbas Kiarostami’s *Like Someone in Love*, Christian Mungiu’s *Beyond the Hills*) along with som

September 7, 2012
— September 12, 2012

The strong strain of folk surrealism that Alexander Dovzhenko introduced to Ukrainian cinema is sampled and celebrated with two of his silent classics, as well as Sergei Parajanov's robust, near delirious *Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors* and others.

August 10, 2012
— August 16, 2012

August 11, 2012
— August 12, 2012

Mutilated on its initial American release, this sumptuous historical drama—more pageant than action film, less reconstruction than reverie—has an artistry that’s only comprehensible in the uncut Italian version, projected on the big screen.